Lost in translation

The US government has in recent months been mired in a linguistic puzzle over whether North Korea has a nuclear weapon or is merely attempting to develop one. This situation is the result of mistranslations from Korean into English, and stems from ideological or political motives rather than linguistic differences.

The confusion over the interpretation of a radio announcement made by the North Korean government last November was caused by a single syllable. The government was first quoted by the South Korea's Yonhap news agency as saying North Korea "has come to have nuclear and other strong weapons". But CNN later reported a South Korean official suggesting a different interpretation - that North Korea was "entitled to have nuclear weapons."

The difference hinges on the semantics of two auxiliary verbs. The latter interpretation is based on hearing toe-it-da (meaning "is entitled to," or "is supposed to"), whereas the first interpretation is based on hearing only toe-t-da (meaning "have come to" or "have turned out to"). It is quite possible that the subtle difference in pronunciation or audibility of the crucial "i" sound in the middle syllable may have caused the confusion. The difficulty also has to do with the fact that Korean is an agglutinative language - one that stacks up morphemes (smallest meaning units) into a single grammatical unit. It is arguably harder to identify all the composite morphemes in a connected speech in a language of this type.

However, it is very rare that the crux of communication hinges on just one fine semantic distinction. The surrounding textual context contributes to the determination of the intended meaning. And so, without any hard evidence of North Korea's possession of nuclear weapons at the time, the US and South Korea opted for the interpretation that North Korea was claiming an entitlement to their development.

Last month a written statement from North Korea about reprocessing fuel rods illustrated how contested translation can allow either side to impose their desired interpretation. This time the interpreters - the US and South Korea - wanted to see ambiguities that might not exist in the original Korean statement. The original North Korean English translation read: "We are successfully reprocessing more than 8,000 spent fuel rods at the final phase." A senior US official challenged the translation on the grounds that the wording of the Korean statement was unclear, and corrected it to read: "We are successfully completing the final phase to the point of the reprocessing operation for some 8,000 spent fuel rods."

The contention seemed to centre on the Korean particle kaji, which could mean either "even" or "to the point of". However, the particle in the disputed sentence clearly means "even". The more literal translation of the sentence, which is in the passive voice, would be "even the work on the reprocessing of about 8,000 fuel rods is proceeding successfully in its final stage." If the particle is interpreted to mean "up to the point", the sentence is left without any identifiable subject. The possibility of any ambiguity of the sentence was also denied by other South Korean linguists.

Whether the US English re-translation was misinterpretation or deliberate re-interpretation, North Korea later changed its English translation to conform to the US version. One can only speculate why North Korea did so, but this demonstrates how translation in the public arena leaves a space where both parties can negotiate their agendas, apparently by tinkering with superficial problems of translation. More fundamentally, "subjective translation" involves surmising the other party's stances and intentions and adjusting one's own positions accordingly. Obviously, focusing on appropriateness or accuracies of translation is less face-threatening than confronting the truthfulness of the expressed message.

· Hae-Young Kim is assistant professor in the department of Asian and African languages and literature, Duke University, US